The New York City Police Department is the nation’s largest municipal force, with 36,650 officers. The civilian agency charged with reviewing misconduct by the police has been notified of two cases — out of the 81 it has been able to track since 2010 — in which the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau upheld its conclusion that an officer had lied.CreditJulie Jacobson/Associated Press

Promotions, Not Punishments, for Officers Accused of Lying

Of the 81 cases in which a civilian review board found an officer had lied, the Police Department pursued “false statement” charges in only two.

The New York City Police Department is the nation’s largest municipal force, with 36,650 officers. The civilian agency charged with reviewing misconduct by the police has been notified of two cases — out of the 81 it has been able to track since 2010 — in which the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau upheld its conclusion that an officer had lied.CreditJulie Jacobson/Associated Press

For years, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a New York City agency that investigates abusive police behavior, has documented every instance it believes it has caught an officer lying. The cases rarely present much of a mystery: Often they involve officers who deny throwing a punch or who downplay the force used during an arrest — only to have their accounts undermined by video recordings.

But the civilian board has no power to mete out discipline in such cases; it refers them to the Police Department for further investigation and possible action.

In case after case, the Police Department reaches the same finding: There is not enough evidence to determine whether the police officer made a false statement, The New York Times found.

The board has been notified of only two cases — out of the 81 it has been able to track since 2010 — in which the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau upheld the board’s accusation that the officer had made a false statement. In the other 79 cases, the Police Department found no wrongdoing or found the officer guilty of lesser misconduct, such as failing to properly fill out a memo book, according to information provided by the board and a document obtained by The Times.

The department isn’t required to tell the board if it takes action. So while the board has been able to learn the outcome of the 81 cases, there are dozens of other false-statement cases whose results the board does not know.

“There didn’t appear to be any disciplinary consequences for cases where it seemed black and white that the officer was not telling the truth,” said Richard Emery, who was the civilian board’s chairman from 2014 to 2016.

The Times has examined how lying remains a persistent problem within the Police Department, which, with its 36,650 officers, is by far the nation’s largest municipal force. A monthslong investigation uncovered a number of cases in recent years in which officers had clearly not told the truth about arrests they had made — a phenomenon with a storied nickname, testilying, that is still tossed around.

But the department’s reluctance to investigate and discipline officers for lying — as shown by the information collected by the civilian review board — appears to be as much of a problem as the initial lies. One reason officers lie, it would seem, is that they can get away with it.

Looking at the cases brought by the review board is only one way to gauge how the Police Department responds to accusations of lying within its ranks. Another way is to review criminal cases that were dismissed after a judge concluded that a police officer’s testimony was not credible.

It is impossible to tally the number of such cases because they are often sealed by the court. But in several cases reviewed by The Times, it was apparent that many officers whose testimony came under suspicion experienced little negative impact to their careers; in fact, a number were subsequently promoted.

One plainclothes officer, Konrad Zakiewicz, was accused by two federal judges of testifying falsely in gun cases in 2013. His career survived. Last year, he was promoted to detective.

So was Nector Martinez, a Bronx police officer who in October 2017 testified falsely against a woman in a gun case, nearly sending her to prison on the basis of a story that appears to be made up. In November he received his gold detective shield.

Another Bronx police officer, Sean Kinane, also made detective last year, even though a federal judge the year before had said his testimony in a drug case was “unreliable” and “not credible.”

In another case, in 2016, a judge rejected the account of an arrest given by a Bronx precinct commander, Christopher McCormack, concluding that little of the commander’s testimony was credible. Yet in March 2017, Inspector McCormack was promoted to deputy chief and put in charge of detectives in Manhattan North.

‘Mistakes Based on Faulty Memory’

The Police Department has pushed back against the claim that lies by officers are not punished.

J. Peter Donald, a spokesman, said the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau has grown more effective in recent years at catching dishonest officers. It has, for example, expanded its integrity-testing unit in which undercover investigators pretend to be crime victims, witnesses or suspects in order to see how officers respond.

“We’re proactively rooting out people who have a problem with the truth,” he said.

Separately, the Police Department convened a panel of top officials who, since 2016, have been reviewing every case in which a judge finds that an officer’s testimony was not believable. The department’s top legal official, Lawrence Byrne, said the cases were not, in the aggregate, indicative of a systemic problem. Often, Mr. Byrne said, the police officer’s testimony was undermined by “mistakes based on faulty memory, not an intentional lie.”

Another police legal official, Ann P. Prunty, went further, saying that at times it is the judges, not the police officers, who are in error. “Sometimes you see a judge who just has a bias and thinks that an officer’s account is implausible,” said Ms. Prunty, an assistant deputy commissioner for legal matters and a former prosecutor in Manhattan. “When you look at it, it is. It’s quite plausible.”

The Police Department noted that it brings dozens of disciplinary proceedings against police officers for making a “false statement” each year. But many of those cases appear to involve internal disciplinary matters — such as falsehoods about injuries, the circumstances of car accidents or off-duty misconduct — rather than incidents in which officers lied about arrests.

“If you intentionally make a false statement as a police officer, as opposed to a mistake, you can and will be terminated for that,” Mr. Byrne said. More than 70 officers have been “fired or forced out of the department in the last five years” for perjury or false statements, Mr. Byrne said in October at a New York City Bar Association event. About 150 more were disciplined to a lesser extent for making false statements in recent years, he said.

On paper, the Police Department’s policy about lying is severe: “Intentionally making a false official statement regarding a material matter will result in dismissal from the Department, absent exceptional circumstances.” The policy notes that statements to the Civilian Complaint Review Board are subject to this policy.

The severity of the punishment may actually discourage the department from bringing police officers up on disciplinary charges for false statements, the Commission to Combat Police Corruption noted in a recent report. With little option for lesser punishment, the Police Department may be trying to avoid ending the career of a police officer over a single lie.

The commission found that the Police Department has been “charging officers with making false official statements in far fewer instances than facts and circumstances seem to warrant.”

In Search of Accountability

The set of 81 cases in which the civilian review board accused officers of lying offers an opportunity to systematically examine how the Police Department handles allegations of dishonesty.

The board, with more than 80 civilian investigators and jurisdiction over a wide range of police abuses, has referred between 13 and 60 false-statement cases to the Police Department annually in each of the last five years.

While many details remain shrouded by police secrecy laws, The Times was able to learn the names of officers cited by the board for false statements in most of the 81 cases, as well as some specifics, from a review of court documents, transcripts and internal Police Department disciplinary documents. Many of the cases involve use of force.

In one 2014 case, video shows an officer capturing a fleeing drug suspect at gunpoint in Brooklyn. The officer can be seen striking the man in the head with his police radio during the arrest.

Two other officers on the scene were interviewed by the civilian board. One officer, Thomas Mikalinis, was cited for a false statement after claiming that the arresting officer had punched the suspect, according to a summary of the case. The second officer, James Cooney, was cited for a false statement for claiming that he did not notice any injuries at the scene.

The police later took the man, Christopher Torres, to the hospital for stitches, according to a lawsuit he filed. A photo said to be taken by a bystander shows blood smeared across Mr. Torres’s face. A video of the episode also appears to show blood on the sidewalk, although it does not establish that either Officer Mikalinis or Officer Cooney would necessarily have seen the arresting officer strike the man in the head with the radio.

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A photograph from a lawsuit against the Police Department that was filed by Christopher Torres, pictured, who was arrested on drug charges in 2014 in Brooklyn.

The Police Department later dismissed the board’s false-statement accusations against the men, according to Police Department records reviewed by The Times.

The two cases out of the 81 that were upheld by the Internal Affairs Bureau could not be identified with certainty. But one might involve a narcotics detective, Evagelos Dimitrakakis. He was accused by the Police Department of including false information in a sworn affidavit for a warrant to search a house in Brooklyn.

The detective’s alleged misconduct was discovered by investigators for the board who noticed the detective’s search warrant seemed to describe a single-family house, when in fact the house had been divided into at least two apartments, according to police records obtained by The Times. That raised the question of whether the detective had performed the investigative steps he claimed to have undertaken in his application for a search warrant.

In an interview with board investigators, Detective Dimitrakakis said that his confidential informant had purchased cocaine from people on different floors of the house, which the Police Department later determined was not true: The purchases had all occurred in a front room on the first floor. Detective Dimitrakakis currently faces the prospect of an internal police trial on charges of making a false statement, according to paperwork relating to his case. He has been transferred out of his former narcotics squad to the quartermaster section.

In the 81 cases it was not unusual for the Police Department to impose discipline for lesser offenses while finding that there was insufficient evidence to conclude the officer had lied. A number of officers, for instance, received minor punishment for failing to make a memo book entry or for failing to properly notify a supervisor. In other cases, officers were found to have either impeded or failed to cooperate with an investigation, which came with a hefty loss of vacation days.

‘A Culture of Dishonesty’

There is nearly a two-year gap in the board’s information regarding the outcome of cases between 2014 and 2016. During this time, there were dozens of additional false-statement cases — possibly more than 70 — that were referred to the Police Department but whose outcome the board never learned.

During that gap, there appear to have been at least four other instances in which the Police Department brought false-statement charges against officers based on the review board’s referrals, according to interviews with police officials.

The department’s top internal prosecutor, Kevin Richardson, said the police force “does take false-statement cases very seriously.” But he faulted the board for referring cases that hardly seemed to rise to the level of a lie.

In one case, Mr. Richardson said, the board had accused an officer of lying because of confusion over the color of a shirt. The officer had explained that he had stopped someone because the police were looking for a suspect wearing a green shirt. But the officer was a shade off. “There was a discrepancy about whether the color of the clothing was green or turquoise,” Mr. Richardson said.

Mr. Richardson said there were other cases over similarly minor discrepancies. “This isn’t an anomaly,” he said.

While the merits of individual cases are debatable, legal experts said they were troubled by the overall record.

“They are willfully ignoring what appear to be false statements, if not outright lies, and it’s intolerable for the Police Department to be doing that,” Christopher T. Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said when informed of The Times’s findings. “That just breeds a culture of dishonesty.”